Selling Business Value to the CFO and CRO - with Sean Brophy, Head of Global Sales, Pigment

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of BenchMarket, and your host of the Metrics at Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now, on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. Today, I am joined by Sean Brophy, the head of global sales at Pigment. We'll be covering four primary topics with Sean today. First, the challenges of selling to the CFO and the CRO as economic buyers. How the business perspective on the value of planning, modeling and forecasting has evolved recently. How do you prove value in return on investment to the CFO as the economic buyer?
Then lastly, we'll wrap up with Sean's top sales performance metrics that he uses as the global head of sales at Pigment. Sean, with that as a background, would you mind giving a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest here on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast?

**Sean Brophy** (1:24)
Yeah, absolutely. First off, thank you for having me, Ray. Great to be spending some time with you.
I've been in sales for the better part of 25 years. I'm based here in the Washington, DC metropolitan area.
I've been in high-tech, startup, scale up environments.
I like to tell my teams I've done all of these jobs in the past. And so I've done renewals. I was a BDR. I did inside sales, field sales, all types of leadership jobs as well. And so my background has been in both commercial as well as government sales. I've had the opportunity to build up teams, partner ecosystems, so on and so forth. And so my preference has been in the data and analytics landscape. And so Pigment is an adjacent cousin to the data analytics space. And so it's really all about across my path is how do you take information or how do you take data, turn it into information and empower your customers to use that information to make more informed decisions. And so I love what I do. And I think that the sales profession is a noble one in helping customers solve big problems. So thanks again for having me here.

**Ray Rike** (2:40)
Thank you, Sean. And with that background, you're the perfect person to be in a role at one of the hottest companies selling to the finance and revenue space. And it goes beyond financial planning and analysis. But before we go to a little bit more about Pigment, let's talk about your target buyer.
So initially, Pigment was very focused on that chief financial officer and finance teams.
But now, as you broaden your focus to the revenue focuses, your revenue organizations, you're also focusing on CROs, sales teams, even HR teams. So tell us a little bit about how that journey, the associated process has evolved now that you saw it beyond just the finance team.

**Sean Brophy** (3:23)
Yeah. So, you know, what we've, you know, where we started was helping solve problems for the office of finance. And so depending upon the size of the customer, CFO, VP of FP&A. And so what we learned along the way and what our core belief was, is that, you know, the idea of integrated planning not only impacts the office of finance, but it actually has a ripple effect through the rest of the organization. And so your sales orgs, your HR teams, your IT teams, supply chain, so on and so forth. And so our journey was one where we started seeing success in the office of finance. Through that success, we were we were given permission or earned the right to have conversations with the other functional areas or lines of businesses. And so the journey for us was one where it started in the office of finance.
We now find ourselves in certain accounts or certain segments or certain markets, for that matter, targeting some of the other adjacent lines of business. And so in a lot of cases, we're targeting the CRO, we're targeting ahead of sales ops or rev ops, we're targeting the person that leads supply chain. And so it makes it fun. It's also complex and challenging. And so when you start thinking about hiring, the profile for the people we hire have to be business minded. They have to have a willingness to go solve problems and be curious because at the end of the day, that's what we're here to do is help our customers, in some cases, broaden the scope of thinking, whether you're in any of those functional areas.